I took this image with the 5D Mark II (and amazing Tokina 16-28 28) and did HDR on a single RAW. I thought I had made a nice image, but the clipped sky is unrecoverable. Bringing the hightlights down in lightroom leads to terrible artifacts (this often works, but not this time). Only thing I can do is to crop the image, but I don't wanna cut those trees.

I spot metered on the people. Was that the right choice? Is this the mediocre dynamic range of the 5D line at work? Would I have recovered the clipped sky better with a Nikon D800? I do realise that bracketing would have been a better choice, but that's after the fact.